Bexar County halts funding for program aimed at helping minority businesses compete for contracts

Bexar County Manager David Smith (left), seen with County Judge Nelson Wolff in 2013, notified Alamo City Black Chamber of Commerce Chairman Eddie Kirby in a letter that the county had suspended funding for his organization’s program that was aimed at helping minority businesses compete for contracts.

Photo: Marvin Pfeiffer /For the San Antonio Express-News

Bexar County has suspended funding for a program aimed at helping small and minority-owned businesses compete for county contracts after “multiple stakeholders” raised questions about the Alamo City Black Chamber of Commerce’s ability to do the job.

County commissioners on June 19 approved $371,750 for the first year of an agreement with the chamber, setting a goal of helping 25 African American-owned businesses submit bids for county contracts by the end of the next fiscal year, which goes through September 2019.

The program is intended to teach firms how to submit requests for proposal and understand bonding, among other skills needed to bid on contracts.

But in a letter to chamber chairman Eddie Kirby, County Manager David Smith wrote that “multiple stakeholders” had raised questions and “requested clarifications” about the agreement, including inquiries about the chamber’s “ability to accomplish the agreement’s capacity building and vendor education goals.”

Others wondered how the program would select vendors and which industries could participate, Smith wrote.

“While I believe the chamber can provide these answers, I also know that for this innovative initiative to succeed, wide stakeholder ‘buy-in’ will be required,” Smith wrote. He said the county won’t implement the program — which it would fund by reimbursing the chamber for its expenses — until “questions and concerns can be appropriately addressed.”

The county’s Small, Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise (SMWBE) Program Advisory Committee never had a chance to weigh in on the agreement, chairman Chris Forbrich said. He called it an “unusual” step to bypass the committee, which advises Commissioners Court on SMWBE policies and activity.

Instead, Forbrich would have preferred that the county enter into an agreement with the Bexar County Mentor-Protégé program; four of the eight firms enrolled in that program qualify as “African-American Business Enterprises,” according to a county information sheet.

The chamber and the Black Contractors Association originally came to the county with an unsolicited proposal for the pilot program, said T.J. Mayes, chief of staff for Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff. The county ultimately entered into its agreement with only the chamber because they could not contract with both entities at the same time, Mayes said.

Forbrich said the Mentor-Protégé program has more robust staffing than the Alamo City Black Chamber of Commerce, though Kirby or other staff could not be reached immediately to answer questions about personnel numbers.

Forbrich also bristled at a sentence in the agreement’s paperwork claiming the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Office had requested the funding; the money will instead come from the county’s undesignated funds. A county staffer attributed the sentence to a “clerical error.”

In his letter to Kirby, Smith wrote that “implementation of this agreement should wait until after the budget is adopted” for the upcoming fiscal year. The five-person Commissioners Court, which sets the county budget, typically adopts new budgets in September ahead of the fiscal year beginning in October.

“This extra time should allow the Chamber to address any concerns or answer questions that the Court or stakeholders might have,” Smith wrote.

The county’s pact with the chamber amounted to a pilot program that could be extended to a five-year agreement worth more than $1.8 million, with the money going to staff salaries, training, supplies and a consultant to help with “ramping” up the program, among other costs.

County staff shaped the program around a study by the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Institute for Economic Development, which found African-American Business Enterprises are vastly underrepresented in the county’s contracting process.

Jasper covers City Hall, local politics and breaking news for the Houston Chronicle through the Hearst Journalism Fellowship program. He previously covered Bexar County and local politics for the San Antonio Express-News. Jasper graduated from Northwestern University in 2017 with degrees in journalism and political science. He has interned for the Tampa Bay Times, Washington Post and Fortune magazine.